The roughly decade-long story of the investigation and prosecution of Turkey’s state-run Halkbank tells the tale of Donald Trump’s efforts over two terms of his presidency to destroy the independence of prosecutors in the so-called “Sovereign District” of New York.
In a nearly half-hour Substack Live conversation, Allison Gill and I track the course of that story, explaining how prosecutors fought off attempts for years to scuttle a criminal case over the biggest violations of anti-Iran sanctions in U.S. history.
During Trump’s first term, two U.S. Attorneys in charge of the Southern District of New York resigned rather than bend to what they described as Trump’s efforts to interfere with their work. The first, Preet Bharara, filed charges against Turkish-Iranian gold trader Reza Zarrab, the mastermind of a $20 billion sanctions busting scheme. The other, Geoffrey Berman, indicted Halkbank, the Turkish state-run bank at the center of the conspiracy.
Trump and his allies had a long history of antagonism to both cases.
Rudy Giuliani, an anti-Iran hawk, shocked many in the legal community by representing Zarrab, who was convicted of enriching the regime to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. Former National Security Advisor John Bolton wrote in his memoir that Trump wanted to interfere with Halkbank’s prosecution as a favor to Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, one of the “dictators he liked.”
Allison Gill and I unpack the case’s tangled history during our conversation and preview Wednesday’s hearing. We also explain why this story might not get a lot of attention during a chaotic news cycle — but should capture your attention as Trump pursues a war against an Iranian regime that was the beneficiary of this conspiracy.
